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Posted by Eric Best on March 31, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
In perusing old notes for a new book, I came upon observations made in an interview with Robert Oxnam, former President of the Asia Society. Oxnam was describing what to him was the need for a true ideology for China, one that could reach beyond "to be rich is glorious" to give the emerging world power a moral and political identity to be proud of, and one that might hold it together more than break it apart.
The real message of Tianenmen Square, Oxnam said, was that students demonstrating for openness, tolerance, and democracy were exercising their right to be students, and to be the conscience of the nation. (My emphasis added).
The phrase stopped me. Where, I wondered, are US students today acting as "the conscience of the nation?" Or did this fade after Vietnam, or go underground after the draft expired?
President Obama, without conferring with Congress, has just put the nation into a third war front in Libya. This is part of a multi-national effort apparently entered into hastily, and without a broad US Mideast military policy to address fomented rebellions there. This Presidential act, one could argue, overreaches the power of the presidency despite alleged authority to fight terrorism on any front for almost any reason. Obama went on TV to the nation March 28 to explain his rationale for US involvement.
I personally support efforts to block Qaddafi's intent to kill his own citizens (whom he may define as 'terrorists,' if it suits him), in the same way I favor intervening if the man upstairs is beating his wife. Boundaries are not the issue, and time is of the essence. I favor intervention when morally and practically required - but not without Congressional due process, and that does not have to take a lot of time. (In the case of the man upstairs, there is no due process and he does not deserve a warning.)
On another front, we learn this week that Obama no longer believes that suspected terrorists should get the Miranda warning afforded them constitutionally, depending on the circumstances and the perceptions of the FBI agent at the time.
An FBI internal memo revealed this week advises its agents:
1. If applicable, agents should ask any and all questions that are reasonably prompted by an immediate concern for the safety of the public or the arresting agents without advising the arrestee of his Miranda rights.
2. After all applicable public safety questions have been exhausted, agents should advise the arrestee of his Miranda rights and seek a waiver of those rights before any further interrogation occurs, absent exceptional circumstances described below.
3. There may be exceptional cases in which, although all relevant public safety questions have been asked, agents nonetheless conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to collect valuable and timely intelligence not related to any immediate threat, and that the government's interest in obtaining this intelligence outweighs the disadvantages of proceeding with unwarned interrogation.
I find it hard to believe that someone who has conspired to commit acts of terrorism will talk if he has not been apprised of his Miranda rights but will clam up once informed that he can be represented by an attorney under US law. Really?
If the students I have in mind were to act conscientiously, they would object to the abuse of presidential power, or even the appearance of it, whether or not it is taking the US into war. They would also object to the selective application of Constitutional rights for "terrorists" because it would occur to them that anyone can be considered a terrorist, and treated accordingly. Surely the farmers in the American Revolution were terrorists in the eyes of the British, who probably had no trouble burning the soles of their feet to coax their plans out of them. That was long before the Geneva Convention or the evolution of US Constitutional law that made us a model for the world.
I would like to see our students defending that.
Posted by Eric Best on March 28, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
A joke my father once brought home on a little poster from his office said:
"Keep your eye on the ball, your shoulder to the wheel and your ear to the ground - now try to work in that position!"
It comes to mind amid further news of the Japan quake and nuclear aftermath, Libyan fly-overs and Yemeni revolution. Oh, and the US Congress is struggling to address entitlement reform as our fiscal balance spins further out of control, and...
As much news as there is in the world demanding our attention, our lives are still immediately in front of us - children to raise (my 12-yer-old son needs a guitar teacher), relationships to tend (tend them, keep them happy; get over that one, find another), and the logistics of daily life (someone just hit the car!).
And just yesterday a potential Florida client who owns newspaper properties pointed out that all the information on the Internet, as alluring as it may be, doesn't necessarily contain the answer or insight you need, if you can find it. Along the way you will spend time you probably don't have being distracted by things that don't matter - or are simply wrong.
All of this served to remind me of a principle that sailing in rough conditions taught me: when things get ugly, slow down and do the right next thing right.
It is simple enough to say, and not as hard to do as one might think. It means bringing the far horizon near, and focusing the mind, eye, hand and attention on the thing at hand that must be done next, and right, before the next right thing can be addressed.
This has the effect of slowing down a turbulent situation and clearing away distractions that at a distance may loom as threatening or out of control - or both.
The good news is that there is always a "next thing" that has to be done right, and doing it right is worth all of one's attention, particularly if errors will be costly (even dangerous).
Slow down and live, you might say.
Posted by Eric Best on March 23, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I was asked to be on a 6 a.m. call this week to London that was cancelled because the European corporate client suddenly had to deal with Japan, its understandable workplace instability amid spreading fears of meltdown and contagion. I had not expected either the call or a related major meeting in Europe to be cancelled, but I was not surprised, given current volatilities around the world.
How prepared are people for the bigger reverberations of major events, and how to deal with them intelligently, of which the first step might be anticipation and planning?
I confess I have not yet read Kenneth Posner’s book, Stalking the Black Swan: Research and Decision Making in a World of Extreme Volatility, although I think it advisable for anyone who applies scenario thinking and other basic risk-management techniques to the rising uncertainties of our time. Posner's attempt, according to reviews, is to mix quantifiable and computer calculation with human instinct, experience and intuition. A worthy goal worth thinking about, and actually trying to do.
(Number me among those readers who attempted Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan and put it down before the end, partly because at a certain point before page 300 I thought I grasped the thesis well enough and because, frankly, Taleb is a writer who does not know why he would use one word if he could use 20. Of those, more than half will be about Taleb's superior view of uncertainty, about which he appears to be uncertain not at all.)
As a longtime scenario practitioner, I have an aversion to certainties of all kinds, partly because it is always the unexpected that changes the way we think and subsequently must behave. Humans must live and work in a constant tension between confidence about what they think they know and flexibility in the face of incomplete information, and sheer ignorance. But how to identify what you do not know well enough and should consider?
Enter Japan's earthquake and unfolding disaster. Were quakes of this kind uncertain? No, they were inevitable (and still are.) Were those plants "safe?" No, they never were, located on the geological "Ring of Fire" that promises serious quakes from here to eternity.
The quake's timing, however, was uncertain, and also the extremity of its effects. We must now all reconsider whether:
- A nuclear cloud will get into the atmosphere and increase cancer risks everywhere
- Anti-nuclear movements will extend globally as the world comprehends that it potentially shares in every other country's nuclear risks
- Nuclear plants should continue to answer the world's energy appetite, given what we now know, and know that we know
- Recalculation of insurance liabilities will render nuclear energy just too costly
- Makers of potassium iodide pills are suddenly a valuable stock investment (Or are you too late?)
I mean this last only partly facetiously. It says something about positive pricing effects in negative macro conditions.
Vital lessons may be taken from Japan's experience - which, pray, does not continue to multiple meltdowns and swathes of dead areas of Japan from nuclear contamination. One lesson might be in the approach that executives and managers take to major "uncertainties" that are likely to unfold at some level and at some point reasonably soon. Don't we know what some of them are?
As much as a U.S. Treasury-market collapse, Middle East (Libya, Saudi-Bahrain) disruptions, oil prices above $120/bbl, rapid global inflation, European financial meltdown and China disruptions are known to be real and proximate possibilities, many corporate and public policy leaders have not really taken the time to think these through.
Scenario thinking continues to be an invaluable tool in the risk-manager's toolbox because it allows for the unthinkable to be more easily thought and for the unspeakable to be spoken in ways that may be heard and acted upon in time. Examples are many of risks that were contemplated with scenarios and where subsequent actions saved millions or produced strategic options that were acted on profitably. Lives might well be saved as well.
Maybe Japan's quake has shaken the rest of the world enough to reconsider how prepared we are, and are not, on some of these fronts. "What if?" remains a powerful question for managing future risk, but only if you really ask it - the right way with the right people around you - and think it through.
Then you must act.
Posted by Eric Best on March 17, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I cannot anticipate the expressed view of "organized labor" in the universal national service debate. I doubt that "labor" would think and act on this as a monolith. It makes more sense to me that labor in general would favor wars of various kinds, because they are stimulative of basic industries that we have not yet farmed out to other countries. Now that might be considered cynical.
Posted by Eric Best on March 15, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted by Eric Best on March 09, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Perusing old notes for a new book project, I find signals in the past that seemed like noise to many people then, but were in fact the signal.
Bran Ferren, now the co-founder of Applied Minds, who had become the head of Imagineering for Disney along the way, was speaking to a CIA audience in the winter of 1998.
He was observing that the number of Web users had hit 100 million in four years and trying to get the audience of official government intelligence workers to think what this might mean.
Imagine, he said (he was then and would become more widely recognized and sought as an expert on imagining), trying to convince the Wright Brothers that in 85 years the industry would be kept alive by mileage incentives.(Newspapers, he said matter-of-factly, would eventually be banned, because too many trees would have to be cut down.)
The "computer revolution" had not even begun, he scoffed, and "the notion of information overload is ludicrous and absurd because humans are made for it." Our evolution was now happening in terms of sensibility and consciousness and you could choose to join actively in the process. (We since have evidence that our intake of information now through all current media is changing the way our brains are developing, and the way we seek meaning.)
If you were not on the Internet at this point, Ferren said, you were on the road to becoming an illiterate. You were missing a crucial opportunity to connect to something fluid and evolving where connectivity would be everything. You needed to start doing R&D in the kind of story-telling you do.
"Right now everyone is doing small r and big D," he went on, "You need to find the smart people and fund them, because it's the best idea we have for inventing the future."
The Internet would be the "single greatest enabling technology for you and your enemies," he said.
"There has never been a great teacher or a great leader who wasn't a great story-teller. Merge story-telling skills with technologists and the disseminators and you have a powerful tool - and an educational system - and if you can touch their hearts, you can open their minds."
His words at that time have a special resonance for me now in light of events in the Middle East. Some of us had done scenarios on that part of the world in the early 90s and at least one future saw the impact of youth and information in new, anti-authoritarian forms.
Did our Central Intelligence Agency not foresee the revolution coming there? Did they lack intelligence, or imagination? What were the chances that cultures living under autocratic or dictatorial rule, with large populations of unemployed youth, could come into the Internet-rich 21st century without unrest? Would it take inflation and food shortages to light their fuses, or would it be something else? Maybe their inevitable connections to the network that was springing up?
It was during the same period (early 1998) that James Barksdale, then CEO of Netscape, was trying to communicate the impacts of Moore's and Metcalfe's Laws on the communication society, as the price of computing power was collapsing by half every 18 months (Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel) and the power of networks was growing "by the square of the endpoints" (Robert Metcalfe, who invented the ethernet).
The Internet as understood then was growing point-to-point and end-to-end at twice the speed of any other network in history, Barksdale was saying. He predicted Internet commerce of $10 billion in the US by 2000 (actual number $152B online sales in US in 2010, up 12% year-on-year). And commerce was only one index of impact and influence.
"You never know where the endpoints will take you," Barksdale said then. "No one can understand the complexity."
It was a cautionary note not to underestimate what you had not yet imagined coming out of this technology. Just as Gutenberg did not know that newspaper would bring down presidents, we did not think - did we? - that the Internet would bring down regimes in the Middle East.
Didn't we?
What would be the impacts of the technology and all the stories that would be told, or could be told, or could be made up and told by friend or foe, to friend or to foe, and propagated on the Internet as it exploded?
If the Wright Brothers could not imagine mileage incentives, could the CIA not imagine Muslim minds opening up to a real democratic urge? Had they or we (I mean, they are our Central Intelligence Agency, after all) grasped the power of story-telling online, and how to tell it?
Just imagine.
Posted by Eric Best on March 03, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted by Eric Best on March 01, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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